Participants generally felt humanlikeness should not be a design goal for a writing-support agent used as a tool¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r1 · q2
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Participants viewed the agent as a tool and said more humanlike social interaction was not preferable in this context. → Michael Yin 2026

Evidence¶

Michael Yin 2026¶

Michael Yin, Angela Chiang, Samuel Rhys Cox, and Robert Xiao. (2026). "It Felt a Bit Eerie": Exploring Humanlike Interactions During Collaborative Writing with an Artificial Agent. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24729 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2605.24729

q2 · i? · causal · r1

When asked directly whether humanlikeness should be a goal (§5.3.3), participants generally said no; P1 stated "Aiming for a more humanlike social interaction is not the best idea in this context".

"Aiming for a more humanlike social interaction is not the best idea in this context"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Humanlike AI co-writing (real-time suggestions and an agentic cursor) evoked feelings of surveillance, judgment and eeriness, and the moving cursor distracted writers — related
• Agent perception followed a U-shape across variants: the mixed temporally-humanlike/visually-nonhumanlike Variant 2 was rated least positively on partnership and agent-perception measures — related
• An agentic cursor increased participants' understanding and predictability of the AI agent's actions during collaborative writing — related
• Different humanlike design dimensions cue distinct classes of anthropomorphism inferences — a broader claim this one bears on
• A conceptual framework paper reports, citing a meta-analysis (Roesler et al., 2021), that anthropomorphism benefits human-robot interaction with effects varying across task contexts and design implementations — a broader claim this one bears on